Qualifications for HE
From HomeEdWiki
Contents |
Do I Need Qualifications in Order to Home Educate My Children?
Introduction
The best qualifications for educating children is to love them and have a good relationship with them. The parents (for parents also read guardians, grandparents or whoever the children are living with) of children are best placed to fulfill these basic requirements. Hopefully the parents have a good consistent relationship with the children that has been built up over a period of years. This love and knowing of the children is the best starting point for education and this can't be gained in a classroom where a teacher has 25+ students.
Formal Qualifications?
There are no requirements for formal qualifications in teaching (or anything else) to say whether or not someone is suitable to home educate their children.
Having studied a course on how to teach doesn't make someone good at it. In fact it could well make them worse at it. For example, if the latest fad is a specific way of teaching reading, then a trained teacher may well use this method indescriminently, where some children would respond far better to other ways of learning. Education and learning is about the interaction of people and not about the application of specific methods.
What About Expertise in a Breadth of Subjects?
Often home educators are questioned as to how they can replace the breadth of knowledge and expertise that professional teachers have. This seems especially true when looking at the later years of education and approaching exams in specific subjects. Teachers would usually have a university degree or some kind of higher level qualification in the specific subject that they are teaching. Home Educators cannot have that for every subject that their children may be interested in.
However there are a number of resources that the home educating family can draw on:
- The local community - search out experts in areas that children are interested in.
- The Internet - googling is an art form.
- The inquisitiveness of children - often children will absorb a huge depth of information and they will be more than happy to go out and search for that information themselves.
- The local library.
- Friends and family.
- Local HE groups.
